Paris winter city break: The Seine, art and romance without the queues

Jostling for a way through the tightly packed crowds outside Notre Dame back in early August last year, my husband and I thought we’d fallen into the black hole of summer tourism. I took a vow: never again would we visit our favourite European city in high season.

December seemed to be a safer bet. Or so we assumed, until forecasts of heavy snow, with more to follow, swept the smiles of anticipation off our faces. But luck was with us. We arrived to find Paris bathed in December sunshine and left to return to London just as the first tentative flakes of snow began to mantle the tip of the Louvre pyramid.

One day later and we might have been obliged to throw ourselves on the mercy of Paris’s most charming small hotel and plead for an extension. I’m not sure that such a fate would have broken our hearts. The bank, maybe, but that’s another matter.

Wintry Seine: Mighty Notre Dame cathedral stands tall above the river

This short vacation was the first time we had made use of Kirker Holidays and I knew we’d made a good choice from the minute their cheery driver held up his clearly printed greetings sign at the Gare du Nord and seized hold of our weighty cases. That driver gave us our first lesson about enjoying Paris in the bitter depths of wintertime: miss a meal if you must, but never scrimp on taxis.

Parisian cabbies may not have the awesome knowledge of their London counterparts, but the ones we met proved friendly, honest and ready to offer a quick briefing on the passing sights of a city that seemed to me, in the quiet days of deep December, to match the airy graces of its springtime fame.

I’d asked Kirker Holidays – ambitiously – for somewhere reasonably priced, near the river and garlanded with a bit of history. Hotel Voltaire, still privately owned, proved a winner on all three counts.

The rooms are small (although €30 more will buy you a much larger one equipped with beds for three). Cramped space, however, seems a small price to pay for what may well be the finest hotel views in Paris.

Hotel Voltaire stands alone in Paris in possessing an actual Seineside location. Slap opposite the Louvre, it offers from a tiny balcony a to-die-for panorama of three bridges, the great barrel roof of the Musee d’Orsay and, off in the distance, both the Eiffel Tower and Paris’s ‘Eye’ – the city’s shiny Big Wheel. Wagner, Pissarro and Baude laire, in days gone by, all chose to stay at Hotel Voltaire and that glittering, light-filled view across the Seine could have come straight from one of the paintings that we had come to Paris to see in the Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais.

Round trip: Paris's big wheel lights up Place de la Concorde

First, however, we embarked on a trip I had always dodged in the past, assuming the ubiquit ous bateaux mouches to be too corny – and too crowded – to offer much pleasure.

December, once again, proved me wrong. Down at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, a row of boats was being prepared, as dusk crept down, for evening diners who wanted a few monumental backdrops to their processional feast. Beyond these elegant cruise boats, we found the cheap and cheerful craft that ply the river daily, ferrying tourists down to Notre Dame and on to where the towers of modern Paris rise into view, before turning back into the romantic city’s heart.

Large heaters brought a toasty warmth to our boat’s spartan interior – adding to the pleasure of a winter trip along one of the loveliest urban rivers in the world. Our pleasure, I’m bound to admit, was hugely enhanced by the fact that our off-season boat was half-empty, and by a charming and helpful commentary. Best of all, and quite unexpected, was the fact that as the boat slid back into port – and our thoughts started to turn to dinner – rays of light blazed out above our heads as the Eiffel Tower lit up, turning it into a neon rocket ready for lunar lift-off.

All lovers of Paris have their favourite restaurants. Ours is the Brasserie Lipp, on Place St Germain. Lipp is friendly, old-fashioned and – in the depths of winter – resolutely, deliciously Parisian. The walls are decorated with glorious Art Deco tiles; service is swift and kindly; plates are lavishly piled. Better still, in wintertime the inner dining room is snug as a warren.

I could eat there every night for a month – and the cost, for Paris, wouldn’t be ruinous.

But it was art, not cuisine (however delectable), that had brought us to Paris, and we began at the Grand Palais, a vast edifice that is offering two of the most stunning – and uniquely distinct – exhibitions of the year. Even the curators have been taken aback by the success of their Monet show. With up to 8,000 visitors a day, it has long since outstripped their Picasso exhibition to become the biggest hit not just of the year, but of the past ten years. We’ve all seen many of these works before – if only on calendars, notebooks and table-mats – but only the most jaded eyes could fail to glory in such a magnificent tribute to Monet’s genius: the play of light over the stolid haystacks; the radiant facades of Rouen Cathedral; the vast abstract waterscapes.

I lingered among the early works; breezy beach scenes, with fluttering flags, parasol-wielding matrons, girls in white dresses: a sequence of scenes from Proust.

Bleaker and more impressive are the paintings of snowfields, rivers filled with ice shards and frozen blocks, barren trees. This harsh environment, the exhibition demonstrates, was the one in which the still young artist refined his skills.

‘We swim in blue air,’ he wrote after a different experience, a summer of painting in the sunbaked South of France. He added: ‘It’s alarming.’

Big draw: Monet's work has attracted huge crowds

Comfort didn’t interest Monet. And winter, clearly, hadn’t deterred him. All the man ever wanted to do was to paint, to experience and to register, in solitude, what he saw, and what he remembered.

If you can get tickets before the show closes on January 24 – and a few are still available – you will experience a glorious homage to an over-exposed painter whose entire life was dedicated to making something extraordinary out of the familiar.

Later we trekked down the street from our hotel – a mere five-minute stroll – to investigate The Treasures Of The Medici. Housed at the Galerie Maillol and drawing crowds of a high-browed and well-shod kind, this eclectic collection – which is on until February 13 – reminds us that the Medici were shrewd bankers who used their trading skills to buy for investment as well as for pleasure.

Botticelli’s exquisite Adoration Of The Magi is here, along with (naturally) a superb Michelangelo statue. But so is a Brazilian feathercloak, a jade death mask from China, and a magnificent statue of a Roman orator disinterred from a vineyard by the Italian artist and historian Vasari. My own fancy was taken by an extravagant trifle from Holland: a minute gold filigree cradle holding one perfect pearl, carved into the shape of a sleeping child.

A taxi drive away is the Gallery of Modern Art, where we found a different crowd – younger, chattier and much better-looking – enjoying the first major retrospective in Paris of New York’s Jean-Michel Basquiat. The artist’s beautiful young face looms above them, wearing the wide grin of a delighted child.

Basquiat was only 28 when he died, in 1988. Famous in his own time, and far more so in ours, he already risks the fate of Monet. His works now sell for similar sums but his style has acquired a familiarity that blinds us to its greatness. This show runs until January 30.

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From the Gallery of Modern Art it was on to the Nissim de Caimondo Museum on Rue Monceau – the best-kept secret in Paris. It is a wonderful private home filled with treasures so perfectly preserved that you expect that one of the Caimondo family – prodigious benefactors to Paris’s art collections – or even Proust (a family friend and regular guest) might step forward with an outstretched hand as you walk into the oval library.

Sliding away from the Gare du Nord, heading home tired and blissful, we watched the first flakes of winter snow begin to fall... I love Paris in the springtime. But our recent trip has taught me to love it every bit as much in the wintry depths of December.

Travel facts

Three nights at the Quai Voltaire costs from £478 per person including return standard class on Eurostar, transfers, breakfast, Kirker’s guide notes to restaurants and sights, a carnet of five Metro tickets each and a Seine river cruise. For more information call 020 7593 2283 or visit www.kirkerholidays.com.